ARTSBEAT; An Unexpected Final Course for Dinner-Table Politics

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: December 15, 2011

Over the last several years, as cultural patrimony cases have roiled the art world, federal marshals have made surprise visits to numerous American museums and galleries to cart away artifacts that foreign governments claimed were looted.

Such a visit has never been much of worry for the people who run Creative Time, the scrappy New York public art organization that helps contemporary artists realize unusual projects like turning a building into a musical instrument or painting signs for Coney Island midway merchants.

But on Tuesday a marshal and a marshal's assistant arrived at the organization's offices in the East Village to take custody of an even more unusual trove of cultural booty:Saddam Hussein's dinner plates, or at least some of those that were believed to be in use in his palaces when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.

The plates were taken out of the country illegally, according to Iraqi officials. Creative Time, which bought them on eBay for Michael Rakowitz, an artist whose Iraqi-Jewish grandparents fled Iraq in 1946, said it believed that an American soldier and an Iraqi citizen first bought them from Iraqis who had looted and carried on a brisk trade in such palace wares some time after the invasion.

The 20 or so plates include a mix of Wedgwood and other china, some that appear to be from Hussein's personal collection and others from the reign of the last Iraqi monarch, Faisal II, who ruled until 1958.

In October and November Mr. Rakowitz used the china in ''Spoils,'' a kind of culinary-political performance piece. He collaborated with the Manhattan restaurant Park Avenue Autumn, which created a special venison-and-date-syrup entree and served it on the plates, which diners could view as the spoils of an unnecessary war or as artifacts of a justly defeated despotism, as thought-provoking agitprop or high-dining sensationalism.

But in late November the Iraqi mission to the United Nations saw news coverage of the project and took its own view. Through a series of inquiries that led from the mission's lawyers to the United Nations Security Council, then to the State and Justice Departments, formal notices were sent to the restaurant and to Creative Time, saying that the plates rightfully belonged to the Iraqi people and should be returned.

And so on Tuesday morning they were, in a strange but cordial - and, it being an art organization, extensively videotaped - visit in which Mr. Rakowitz and Creative Time curators helped pack up the plates, which were then driven to the Iraqi mission to the United Nations on the Upper East Side.

Later that afternoon the plates were rushed to Washington and given to the staff of Iraqi Prime MinisterNuri Kamal al-Maliki, who was in town to meet withPresident Obama.

''They are going back to Iraq today with the prime minister on his private plane,'' T. Hamid al-Bayati, the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations, said in an interview on Wednesday.

He added that even though the plates were not antiquities or looted art, per se, they were nonetheless of cultural importance to Iraq, which plans to convert some of Hussein's palaces to museums - highly preserved reminders of the opulence and power of his regime - after American troops withdraw.

''Artifacts like these should go back to the palaces, or what are you going to display there?'' Mr. Bayati said. ''These were the things that Saddam used, and they should be seen by the Iraqi people.'' (In New York the plates were seen by about 700 diners, who each paid $38 an entree during the run of the project.)

In the prelude to the American invasion, and then afterward, looters ransacked buildings across Iraq, including its museums, illegally selling and exporting thousands of artifacts.

The United States has helped track down and return more than 1,000 such pieces, most of them much more ancient and precious than late-20th-century dinnerware. Iraqi archaeological officials have said that for all the outrage the looting stirred toward the United States and its allies, many of the items were smuggled out of the country before the invasion, often with the connivance of Hussein's government.

Creative Time officials paid about $200 to $300 a plate from two sellers - one believed to be a former American soldier, the other a Iraqi refugee living outside Detroit.

The organization said that it immediately agreed to hand over the plates as soon as it was informed by the restaurant that the United States Attorney in Manhattan, acting at the request of the State Department, wanted them returned.

''We told them that we would be delighted to return the plates because we couldn't have imagined a better end to this project,'' said Anne Pasternak, the president and artistic director of Creative Time, who was present for the marshal's visit. ''We thought that this would provoke the kind of discussion that's now happening, but we thought it would happen at the beginning of the project, when people were eating off them, not at the end.''

Mr. Rakowitz, who lives in Chicago but happened to be in New York visiting family, was able to rush to the offices to be present during the handoff of the plates. And after the marshal took the plates away, he and two Creative Time staff members jumped into a cab and went to the Iraqi mission, where they were surprised to be ushered into an office where the plates were being unboxed and formally repatriated. ''It was pretty surreal,'' he said.

Mr. Rakowitz had hoped to keep the plates - at least those that survived their art turn; the restaurant broke a few, he said - for another Iraq-related artwork he was planning. But he said they would actually be more powerful works of art back in the place where they came from.

''The fact that the Iraqi government wants these kinds of things back is very important, I think,'' he said. ''It's a signal that they don't want a kind of mass cultural amnesia about this part of the country's past, which is something that happens a lot in countries that go through this kind of upheaval.

''Iraqis have taken a lot of these kinds of things into their own homes,'' Mr. Rakowitz added. ''Many of them use these plates as their daily dining ware.''

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.